Wandering worlds, wondering words…

It also hit me that I will have a problem experimenting with his different energy colors because I am liable to spend an hour in the Appearance editor tweaking optimum color combinations to match the current element I’m fooling around with.

I mean, how do I pass up the opportunity to color coordinate a red dragon, a black (D&D black dragons spit acid) or green toxic dragon, a light blue or white ice dragon or a deep blue or purple electric dragon reminiscent of GW2’s Kralkatorrik?

Well, I did try for all of 8 minutes to aspire to “meta” greatness by watching a Chroma build guide video, only to sort through my current stash of mods to determine about three quarters of the necessary mod cards were not yet in my possession.

(Right, gotta have a future goal to grind towards. Start looking for ability strength and duration stuff at some point.)

Anyhow, the frame still needed to rank up to 30 from 0 before even having the mod space to approach the distant neighborhood of optimal.

So I went for fun and killing a few birds (or infested alien monsters) with the same flamethrower.

That is, I had an Ignis to also rank up. The Ignis is a flamethrower with innate Heat damage. It didn’t have the mod space to get fancy with secondary damage types yet, since it was starting from near zero (well, 10 mastery) so I popped on a weak Serration and called it done.

Then I went for a fire Chroma to play around with EVEN MOAR FIRE while testing out all the various abilities and ranking up at the same time.

I’m sure some people have mathed it all out (and I will get around to looking at the results of that math and aping it the moment I want to try soloing an Eidolon or considering higher level missions) but at level 25-35 missions, the amount of sheer AoE chaos from spewing fire all over the place is… probably extremely non-optimal but exceedingly gratifying.

I probably need to put Ember on the wish list at some point, I have a terrible weakness for all things fire.

Apparently, Chroma got nerfed or reworked at some point (says Google while I was searching around) and some people feel the current version is a little too weak in comparison to other frames. Since I was never around for the “before” version, I have no standard of comparison anyway.

For now, I’m content to just mess about and have fun discovering new and different playstyles while looking goddamn good.

It is super duper rare that I am beaming all over after playing a game. I am, by nature, more of a cynic and a pessimist. Outwardly, anyhow, so as to protect the teeny tiny kernel of eternal hope within from crushing disappointment.

But tonight, I am grinning from ear to ear like a Cheshire Cat of epic proportions.

On the 12th of November, since I was coming down from a GW2 legendary push, I started playing Warframe more heavily and giving it a more focused shot at void relic farming for Chroma Prime.

Somehow, a Chroma Prime Chassis blueprint dropped from solo opening one of my few Meso T3 relics (20% chance, after farming enough Void Traces to boost them to Radiant status.)

Bolstered by the first part finally dropping, I went ahead to crack open some Intact Neo K2 relics (25% chance for the Chroma Prime Blueprint itself), assuming that this would be the easiest part to obtain.

The 2% chance is if one brings the relic as is, “Intact” to a mission.

Improving the drop rate means upgrading with a Void Traces currency (which itself must be farmed by opening other relics). The best chance one can get for those two parts is 10%, which costs a fairly hefty amount of 100 Void Traces to bring it to Radiant.

Missions, by the way, are arranged in the order of difficulty from Lith (Easy), Meso (Okay), Neo (Medium-ish) and Axi (Pretty Durned Hard).

Lith would be tedious in terms of grind, but at least the missions would be something I could easily do.

Axi honestly terrified me. It would push the limits of where I currently am at with my warframes and weapons and mods.

After a few nights of patiently farming a grand total of three Lith C3s and three Axi C3s, tonight a 7 hour resource booster dropped as a free gift from the daily, which I noted doubled the Void Trace drop quantity.

Taking advantage of this, I changed plans and boosted all six of them to Radiant ever slowly and steadily farming in my inefficient solo way (which at least lets me have the agency to shoot mobs rather than wait for someone else to play the game for me.)

Naturally, once they were Radiant, I just -had- to try to crack them open.

After two missions of generously bringing Radiant Lith C3s and a Saryn to public groups just throwing in random Intact Liths, I decided I was tired of watching things die to another player pushing one button (and me being little better, snatching up what remained from that player and pushing my own button 4 to AoE wipe out the stragglers.)

Also, I had hoped that maybe another player might have some to improve my chances, but it apparently was a revolving door of some players deciding to drop after checking out the party and probably what relics were on offer.

So I played my last Lith relic as a legit slower solo, taking my time to open some containers and shoot some mobs and kubrows for the hell of it.

Oh yeah.

Axi was left.

*shudder*

I gamely tried a level 41-43 Axi mission that was Corpus Defence by myself. I brought my Frost Prime, which I figured would give the objective the best chance at survival, and my best weapon and my best everything.

His Snow Globe was getting ripped apart but I was managing to keep it up and stacked… until the Nullifiers showed up. One thing or another happened, the globe kept dissolving, I kept getting ragdolled around and barely clung on (losing two lives in the process.)

Then the Corrupted Ambulas showed up, which was apparently some kind of ridiculously high hp TANK of a boss mob and me with the wrong weapon damage type/no knowledge of how to deal with it. It took some five minutes of slowly nickel and diming it to death.

The next wave (wave 4, I believe) began, and a SECOND Corrupted Ambulas landed, accompanied by a veritable wave of robotic laser-toting moas which do horrible things to the Snow Globe.

That was when I surrendered and aborted that mission.

Public matches it would have to be.

At least I would be bringing an offering of a Radiant Axi C3 relic, which I assumed a more high rank player would be happier to crack open for everyone to benefit from.

Along that vein of thinking, I brought along my Rhino Prime so that I could both stay alive with Iron Skin and just Roar to give whoever was going to do the major part of the killing a little more damage.

Two missions and two teams went by. Nothing.

On the second team, two players voted to stay for waves 6-10, one decided to extract, and I decided to follow along with the two that hadn’t violently barfed and run off from my low to middle ranked mastery level.

My -last- Axi C3 relic… else I would have to repeat the process for another couple days.

Kindness rewarded.

YEEEEEEEEESSSS.

Very very happy camper right now.

In 3 days and 12 hours later, I can take the shiny new prime warframe out for a test run.

Laughably, I don’t even have the base Chroma yet and have no clue what it does. I like the idea of a dragon warframe, but found the normal Chroma both ugly and a bit tedious to make as it required farming up other warframe parts. The ugliness really did not help the appeal.

Chroma Prime, though. Love its look. Very similar in structure to the Palatine Rhino skin which is my top favorite fashion warframe. Had to have it.

Now I do. Feels so good.

—

Oh, and as additional icing on today’s cake, I was right in my last post that Path of Exile would be launching its hype cycle pretty darned soon.

Previously, these treasure hunting kits have been piling up in my inventory, ignored in favor of all the other things I could be doing for more reward instead.

Since finishing Astralaria on Oct 31 or so, I’ve been in a more lax period of rest and recuperation.

It was actually quite strange. I was nose to the grindstone chugging along for the week or so before, and when I made the legendary axe, the initial feeling on seeing it completed was, “Is that it?”

It just seemed more understated than envisioned in my head. For one, it’s ordinary silver when sheathed and only does its starry night glow thing when wielded.

And it just seemed like such a small item compared to all the giant hoops I had been jumping through that I felt almost letdown.

Fortunately, when I finally put it on the character I intended to use it on and with a bit of fancy cosmetic kitting out with an outfit that was just released on that very same day, the initial disappointment has been slowly moving towards long term contentment.

It looks bigger on charr, for one.

Using the haunted armor outfit with a tactically selected blue dye channel also provides a bit more particle effect glow to support it, and it lets me escape the tyranny of medium armor trenchcoats for this Ash Legion ranger/druid. Win win.

Adding to the satisfaction is the ability to envision/depict a character that only existed in my head before. This is Bastia the Bloodhound, one of the supporting characters in my long ago short “Loyalty to the Legion”.

Except a little further back in time in her younger days as Bastia Shroudmourn, gladium, after losing the rest of her warband in the story she told Flame.

That is, Flame Fireflash, the Ash Legion engineer star of the story in question, whose look has been slightly updated with the Predator rifle below.

Rakis and Brek are in the works.

Here’s a sneak peek via the character select screen, of them post incarceration and more grown up.

Rakis, being the ever-unchanging shifty-eyed sneak thief of bitter proportions; and Brek, originally a big warrior doofus following the wrong company, now haunted by voices and slightly unhinged by a madness that crept up on him while doing his time – which is just my fancy way of justifying making him a revenant to fill a hole in my charr collection.

Anyhow, the next thing that struck me was that Bastia really needed the Howler warhorn to go with Astralaria. *gulp*

On the bright side, Howler is an older legendary and much cheaper and less insanely intensive than Astralaria. On the flip side, I also want to finish legendary medium armor to finally close the book on that chapter. (It’s still SO horribly ugly though, that I would have to immediately transmute it and use it only for its function.)

Regardless of which super long term goal gets prioritized, I’m back into a period of resource accumulation downtime. I was thinking of focusing a bit more on short and medium term chievos and collections while sloowly ticking off bits of the long term stuff (aka chak gerent eggs, faction provisioner tokens and ascended material crafting every couple of days or so).

Except that chasing more achievements didn’t really seem like a break after coming down from the pursuit of a legendary, which is like a giant spreadsheet of achievement hunting.

Enter the Treasure Hunting Kits, which have been accumulating in my shared inventory and are now at 235 items, threatening to very shortly hit the max of 250 in a stack and burst.

Since I am constitutionally incapable of throwing away anything, even if doing them is way less profitable than sitting for hours in an Istan farm, I decided to attempt a few.

This time, however, I had a neat idea that completely revolutionized my perspective on these things.

I told myself, I’ll make it a solo “mini-adventure.”

The rules are, once you zone in to the nearest waypoint to the blue circle, every mob you pass, you kill; every harvesting node you pass, you harvest; every cache and sand pile and container you pass, you open; every event that pops up, you do.

Previously I was treating them like how the ordinary player treats them – trigger them, find blue circle, waypoint to blue circle, mount up and rush to the chest, take out the buried treasure, rinse and repeat. At the end of it, open a bunch of buried treasure and feel a little cheated by the loot gained.

I have decided that this is the wrong way to use them.

Treating them like mini-adventures really turns them into something like Rift’s instant adventures – a little randomized hit of content through the open world, easily completed in a couple of minutes, with a treasure chest at the end.

The profit comes not just in the final treasure chest, but in all the xp (a ton, since no one kills PoF mobs anymore), random mob drops (it’s been nearly five years since magic find was introduced, I’m at 290% base magic find by now) and harvesting nodes along the way.

Sure, it’s not Istan-levels of profitable, but it’s a nice change of pace for when running around as a farming zerg gets boring, when one is sick of dealing with other people in instanced group content, or otherwise tired of running around with laser focus on achieving a goal.

Given the peaceful feeling of re-experiencing something akin to leveling gameplay, where one just wanders across the open world keeping one’s eyes open for things happening along the way, well, it’s worth the potential loss of gold earning opportunity (which in reality wasn’t going to happen anyway, because I can only farm for one round of a meta before getting bored out of my skull and logging off to find another game.)

Suddenly, I’m in a good place in GW2 with a lot of things to do and no immediate deadline.

Minute to minute short term, I have treasure hunting kits. On a medium scale, I have a bunch of incomplete achievement tabs for Living Story 4 and PoF/HoT zones. In the long term, there are legendaries waiting in the wings.

Then other-game-wise, Fortuna just released in Warframe (yipes) while I’m -still- half-heartedly trying for Chroma Prime and now need another prime part to unlock the last rank in a Syndicate. I also suspect Path of Exile will be dropping the next bit of hype soon in mid to late November for whatever they’re planning in December once Delve league ends.